Local sighting is only the 14th confirmed spotting of the bird in Florida

Big-time birder Bob Duncan was in a remote jungle camp in the Amazon basin region of Ecuador when he got the alert — even some of the most remote areas have Wi-Fi — that a white-tailed tropical bird had been spotted in Gulf Breeze.

That's a pretty rare bird, but not rare enough for Duncan, 82, to abandon the jungle trek that he was on with his wife, Lucy.

Good thing he didn't find out until he got home to Gulf Breeze that the bird had been misidentified and was actually an even more rare bird for the area — the red-billed tropicbird. Otherwise, Duncan might have caught the next plane home.

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To area birdwatchers, spotting that tropicbird is like seeing Elvis flying over Gulf Breeze's Shoreline Park, where local ornithological enthusiasts — "bird people" — have been flocking to since April to spy the graceful and elusive, largely white bird.

"Once we found out what it was, our adrenaline really got going,'' Duncan said Monday from a gazebo at Shoreline Park, where four other birders had nested for a bit to watch the slender, mostly white bird, fly to and fro.

"We've had four fly-bys today,'' said Aline Nicholson, staring out at the waters off Shoreline Park searching for the bird, which is usually found in the tropical Atlantic, eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans.

A rare red-billed tropicbird has been seen since March near Gulf Breeze(Photo: Courtesy of Aline Nicholson)

Only three have been identified in the Pensacola area, said Stone, a "Field Note" contributor for the local Francis M. Weston Audubon Society newsletter. Two of those were found dead after past hurricanes.

The current red-billed tropicbird is only the 14th confirmed spotting of the bird in Florida, with other sightings occurring mostly in South Florida, especially the Florida Keys.

The bird was first spotted near Shoreline Park in March, and by early April, word was already getting out among local bird people and even getting online notice on birding sites such as ebird.org, operated by Cornell Lab of Orinthology in New York.

Since then, birders have been coming to Shoreline Park daily to try to catch a glimpse of the bird, which Duncan and others believe lost its navigational ability, ending up in Northwest Florida because of illness or strong winds that came through the area.

The bird is known to have poor aquatic abilities and its primary diet is flying fish.

"And we don't have a lot of flying fish around here,'' Duncan said. "We really don't know what it eats or how it got here."

He said birders from far away have come to see the bird.

"Arkansas, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Tennessee. People have been coming from all over." he said.

The bird has primarily been seen around Shoreline Park. Duncan and other birdwatchers said the best time to possibly see the bird is from about 2 to 4 p.m.